Obstacle Avoidance Subsystem for an Autonomous Robot

This research project details the design and implementation of the Obstacle Avoidance Subsystem for the Tigertron autonomous robot. This subsystem is designed to function as a smaller part of the whole Software Architecture and has the purpose of detecting, through use of a Laser Rangefinder, obstacles in the vehicle’s environment. Once the hardware is set up and configured, the Tigertron’s central software control architecture requests data from the Laser Rangefinder through a serial communication channel. This data is converted into objects that represent obstacles in the form of polar coordinates. These objects are stored in a container so the central control architecture can determine the best route to avoid these obstacles while still navigating to route waypoints